I used to love to watch DVDs of Friends with my mom. We would sit on the couch in the den and sip hot chocolate. My mom made very, very good hot chocolate. Sometimes she made it with a sprinkling of coconut and sometimes she made it with a dash of hot chili powder. She never made it from a packet.
I loved how sophisticated and exotic my mom was in some ways. Just think of her name: Mira. I used to love to look at the New York Times Style Magazine with her those weekends when it would appear with the Sunday newspaper. Sometimes, she’d show me pictures of the ways she had dressed when she was living in Greenwich Village before she met my dad. It was nothing like how she dressed in Vermont.
I used to love to be read to in bed when I was a toddler and a little girl. My mom and dad would alternate nights, and the rule was that they would read me four books when I was very young and then forty minutes to an hour when I was older. One night when my dad was reading to me from Sideways Stories from Wayside School, we got to the scene where we learn that Calvin has a tattoo of a potato on his ankle, and for some reason we wound up laughing hysterically for fifteen minutes. We just couldn’t stop.
I loved my bedroom with my stuffed animals and trolls and the chest that still had my dress-up clothes from when I was a little kid. I loved my bookcases, two of them, both white, which went to the ceiling. I loved my window seat in the sun. I loved my diaries and my journals.
I loved my clothes. I loved my iPod. I loved my phone.
I loved the posters I brought back from the Emily Dickinson Homestead in Amherst when I was fourteen that my mom had gotten framed.
I loved Maggie. I loved the way my dad called her Maggie May and sometimes sang her a line or two from that song when he rubbed her tummy.
I am telling you this so you know that my life wasn’t always wall-to-wall suckage. I know I’ve tried to make that point before, but it’s really important to me that you get this. Sure, my parents were not happy in Vermont. They didn’t belong here. Sure, they fought in ways that left me scared. They drank—they drank a lot. And, of course, I was starting to screw up well before the meltdown that made me an orphan.
But if I am being as honest as I promised I’d be, you need to know that in some ways I was really a lucky child. I know I brought a lot of my nightmare down upon myself.
I’m not sure why I picked Burlington. But I know now that the homeless of all ages from northern Vermont and New Hampshire and upstate New York wind up there. Always have. It’s a city, which means it has social services. And drugs. And bars. And people—some of whom want to help you and some of whom just want to exploit you.
And I guess I was following the crowds, that whole stream that was flowing away from the Kingdom. It was amazing the sort of chaos I found in Burlington. Reactor One had exploded little more than twenty-five hours earlier, and already there were tents all over the waterfront and City Hall Park and I heard for the first time the terms “walker” and “downwinder.” I’ve already told you that most of the walkers didn’t actually walk to Burlington; likewise, many of the downwinders didn’t technically live downwind of the fallout. Some of us, like me, were from right smack in the middle of the disaster—not downwind of it at all. And others were coming from areas that, in the end, would prove to be safe. Or, I guess, safe enough. But there were lots of pregnant women among the downwinders and lots of young moms with their toddlers and lots of old people. These were people who didn’t want to leave anything to chance and just got the hell out.
Sometimes I think we all got used to the word “walker” instead of “downwinder” because it had one less syllable. And it was a lot faster for everyone who gave a damn about Twitter to hashtag, right?
Still, it took me a while to even get those last few miles into the city to see all the madness for myself. Traffic on the roads around Burlington was either at a complete standstill or moving no more than a couple of miles an hour. And I couldn’t even really bike around the cars a lot of the time, because what was supposed to be two lanes in each direction had become four lanes in one and one in the other. That’s right, five rows of vehicles were wedged into four lanes. And the sidewalks were filled with people who had hitchhiked their way this close or had gotten rides from friends (and, I guess, bread trucks), and so even those of us with bikes finally just got off them and walked them for miles.
But the road into Burlington is filled with fast-food and coffee places like McDonald’s and Starbucks and Moe’s, and they were all giving us bottles of water and juice until they ran out. It was kind of sweet. The police officers were trying to move the cars along, but it was gridlock at every intersection. People would ask for news, and the news was just depressing. The worst for me? This was the moment when I learned that my dad’s engineer friend Eric Cunningham had killed himself. Apparently he had survived the blast, but he felt so bad about whatever had happened—whatever had gone wrong—that he’d shot himself with a hunting rifle later that day. I didn’t even know he had one. I mean, he and my dad played paddle tennis together. Once in a while, they went skiing together. (They never went hunting together. My dad wasn’t a hunter.)
Still, at least it wasn’t raining. And when I finally reached the top of the hill above Burlington, Lake Champlain and the Adirondack Mountains looked like a travel and tourism ad. Really, everything Vermont is supposed to be. As a matter of fact, because the sun was out, I was kind of sunburned by the time I was finally able to climb back onto my bike and coast down the shoulder of Main Street into the city.
Chapter 9
I never did get my driver’s license, as you know, but I did have a learner’s permit. A couple of days a week, my parents would drive to and from the plant together in my dad’s Audi. So I’d just take my mom’s Subaru and drive wherever. To Lisa’s or Ethan’s. One time all the way to Littleton, New Hampshire, where there are actual stores with decent blue jeans and tops. Obviously this was against the law and impressively clueless. I never got caught by the police, but when my parents found out what I was doing, it was kind of like being busted. They screamed at me and I screamed back. And then they took away my phone and grounded me for a week.
Poacher was very smart—or, at least, smarter than a person might sometimes think he was. One time when we were all sitting around with a nice little buzz on watching the news on TV, some expert started talking about operator error at Cape Abenaki, and what went wrong and why the fuel rods broke and the uranium pellets fell out and started melting down. It was the eleven o’clock news, so we were all pretty chill.
Poacher sat forward a little bit on the mattress, shaking his head, and said, “Those poor fucks never had a chance.”
Trevor, who was in one of those slightly defiant, challenge-the-alpha-male-father-figure modes, said, “I don’t know. I think they blew it. Don’t you? Just screwed up. I mean, weren’t they trained for this sort of bullshit?”
“Oh, sure, they were trained,” Poacher answered. “Some might have been very well trained. But there are some folks who have the right stuff and there are some folks who just don’t. I saw that all the time in Kuwait. There are some people who will stay cool no matter what’s going down, and there are some people who wig out. Or do nothing, when doing anything is better than doing nothing. They just freeze. And those dudes in the control room running Cape Abenaki? This was no drill. This was the real thing. And they’re just, like, operators. They operate systems. That’s what they do. It’s all rote. It’s all procedure. And think about it: these days, all the procedures are on computers. Sure, they probably had some paper manual explaining what the fuck they were supposed to do. But if it’s anything like the systems shit I saw in the army, all the piping and instrument diagrams would have been stored on the computers. And so when the computer network goes down—poof!—a big part of the road map they need is gone. The electronic records just disappear. I mean, I have no idea what kind of light is left when the batteries are failing. Is it dim? Is it, suddenly, pitch-black? Those poor operator sons-of-bitches mu
st have been shitting in their pants. Picture it. I don’t know, maybe one of them had the right stuff. Maybe not. But all that training? Forgotten in the panic. In the dark. I feel for them. They’re just people and it’s black or at least almost black and you’re in this control room next to a pair of nuclear reactors and you know that at least one of them is about to explode and there’s not a thing you can do. Not one fucking thing. Let’s face it: When you can’t find the valves or the piping or whatever the fuck materials you need? Game over. Game … over.” And then he made that noise the Pac-Man games make when Blinky, Pinky, or Clyde gobbles up the very last of your Pac-Men, and he spiraled his finger like water was leaving a bathtub.
I was pretty sure he was right. Over the years I’d overheard conversations here and there between my dad and mom or between my dad and other engineers about the emergency procedures. And so now I saw my dad, standing there in the control room in his white PCs—maybe even my mom too. (PC was the term they used for “protective clothing.” It has nothing to do with “political correctness.” Don’t forget, this was a nuclear power plant we’re talking about. The last thing a nuclear power plant worries about is political correctness.) I saw him standing there in those little booties they were all required to wear. (In fact, my dad wore booties over his booties. There were very special ways you got in and out of your clothes, even your gloves. There were “change-out” pads and a whole “change-out” protocol.) And suddenly I knew I was going to be sick. I got up off the couch, stepping on PJ’s leg on the way—he yelled at me and I ignored him—and ran into the bathroom and started vomiting into the toilet. Andrea was right behind me, holding my hair away from my face and rubbing my back. I was puking and crying and I couldn’t stop for, it seemed, forever.
When I was done, I was surprised that no one was in the doorway watching. Asking me if maybe I had swallowed some pills I shouldn’t have. Andrea explained that they had come to see what the hell was going on, but she had made them go away and leave me alone. Then she ran some hot water and helped me to wash my face. We were sitting together on the side of the bathtub.
“You didn’t take something wacky, right?” she asked.
“No. It was just … just those people in the plant.”
“That’s why you were crying?”
“Uh-huh.”
See what I mean about what a great sister Andrea was? Looking back, I wish I had confessed right that moment that I was imagining my parents in the dark in that control room. Maybe if Andrea had known who I was, she would have stayed. Sure, in those days most of Vermont hated anyone who had anything to do with Cape Abenaki, but I don’t think Andrea would have cared. I really don’t. She was that kind of friend.
When I reread what I’ve written so far, I seem to be crying a lot. I guess I do cry pretty easily. I’m sorry.
But, in all fairness, I was in kind of a bad place. I think it would have been way weirder if I wasn’t crying all the time—or, at least, as often as I was.
For a while I wandered aimlessly around the tents and blankets on the grass in Burlington’s City Hall Park that first afternoon. If you didn’t know the world was ending, you might have thought it was a Phish concert, except the crowd had a lot more old people and a lot less dope. The air smelled mostly of fear. Eventually I dropped my bike on the grass beside this little amphitheater garden, and then I collapsed on the ground right beside it. It was early in the afternoon and I had picked a spot between a family of five on these Disney beach towels and two senior citizen grandparents with a little hibachi. Everyone wanted to feed me, and I let them. It was a bit like a picnic, except for the teeny-tiny detail that everyone was still scared to death that the plume was going to come this way, and everyone was cursing the company that ran Cape Abenaki and everyone associated with the nuclear power plant. It was kind of a hate mob mentality.
But we all still had to eat, and I was famished. I ate a couple of these Smucker’s Uncrustable prepackaged peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which a few weeks later would become one of my favorite munchies when I was stoned off my ass, and I ate grilled lamb and onions on wooden skewers. The Uncrustables were courtesy of the younger family, and the lamb was from the older couple.
After we ate, the Disney dad offered to bring me over to the Red Cross tent and see about getting me some help, but I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that plan. The Red Cross would try and get me—Abby Bliss—reconnected with my parents, and no good was going to come from that. Pretty quickly they’d figure out that I had made up this name and then they’d figure out who I was. And I wasn’t convinced people would be real excited to meet Bill and Mira Shepard’s daughter. Meanwhile, that grandmother—who was actually spreading face cream on her cheeks and offering me sunscreen, like our biggest problems that day were wrinkles and sunburn—was suggesting that I visit the shelter for homeless teens not far from the north end of Church Street. She had read an article about it in the newspaper the day before yesterday. I thought about my options and decided that the shelter strategy seemed a lot more promising, especially because there I could pretend I was just a run-of-the-mill runaway—not a walker who needed to find her mom and dad. I’d have to convince them I was eighteen, but I figured I could make that work for a while. All I was trying to do was buy a little time to figure out what I was going to do in the long run.
And so about six-thirty I showed up at the front door of the shelter.
The weirdest thing that happened my first night there? Someone stole my bike.
Here is that list of Interesting People Named Emily I promised. Again, my rule is interesting, not famous—though most of these women are somewhere between sort of and seriously famous.
Emily Dickinson: Poet and recluse. She might, in fact, be the world’s most well-known recluse, and it’s not easy to be famous and private. That’s an impressive accomplishment and makes her very interesting.
Emily Watson: Actress. I’ve seen two of her movies, and she’s very good. Plays crazy people and moms. I approve.
Emily Stetson: Claimed to have put stakes through the hearts of twin vampires in a village in Wales in 1905. Was never charged with a crime because there were no missing persons and they never found any bodies. But here’s what makes her so interesting: she was thanked by the vicar for digging up two graves in the church cemetery and giving a pair of souls their much-deserved rest. The village loved her. Loved her.
Emily Post: Stupendously OCD about manners.
Emily Brontë: Gave us Wuthering Heights. ’Nuff said.
Emily Paulsen: First girl to play running back for a high school football team in Vermont. Broke her ribs in ninth grade, her left leg in tenth, and had a concussion in twelfth. But her junior year? She led the state in rushing yards.
Emily Blunt: Another actress—and, like Emily Watson, British. Also like Watson, she’s great at playing women about to go mental.
There are also a couple of nineteenth-century women’s rights activists named Emily, but I couldn’t finish reading the web pages I found about them. Way too boring. They are not (just my opinion) very interesting. Sorry. Maybe they weren’t crazy enough for me. Maybe my definition of interesting is “crazy.”
I slept like a dead person my first night in the shelter. I don’t recall a single dream.
My room was slender and not all that long and there was absolutely nothing on the walls. It had a bed and a dresser and a window. It faced out on an alley and a brick building, but I really didn’t care about the view. It was on the third floor, and so it was a little steamy in June, but I knew I was lucky to have it, as bare and Spartan as it was. It was, after all, the last room the shelter had left, and I only got it because they had just moved the girl who was in there before me—one of their success stories—into a little apartment of her own. And while a few other kids told me later that they’d been pretty frightened their first night in the shelter, I think I was too exhausted to be scared. Besides, I had no idea of the drama I was in for: the endless, energy
-sucking, always-on-the-edge-of-hysteria drama queenitis that was Situation Normal for most of the girls there. And I thought that once upon a time I had been high maintenance? Yeah, right. I didn’t know the meaning of the expression “high-maintenance.”
Anyway, in the morning I woke up feeling so good that I began to believe my parents might not really be dead and were out there somewhere looking for me. They were worried and desperate—which made me excited and hopeful. And so even before I had showered, I asked the girl in the room across the hall if I could use her phone. (This would, of course, prove to be a gigantic mistake.) Her name was Camille and she was a runaway from Barre, Vermont. Her mom and dad both worked in a company that specialized in caskets for infants. No wonder she was so fucked up: her parents made coffins for babies. But she handed me her phone, and immediately I called my mom and dad and left them both messages. I told them where I was and to please come get me. Then I figured I’d hang out at the shelter until they called.
But, of course, I wasn’t allowed to hang out at the shelter. They had told me the night before that I was supposed to be out of there by eight in the morning, but I didn’t think they’d really care. They did. So I borrowed Camille’s cell a second time and left the number for the shelter’s drop-in on my parents’ phones and said they could find me there. I said to ask for Abby Bliss, and I’d explain why when we were together.
I became a part of Edie’s caseload right after breakfast, and I spent the rest of the morning making up stories for her—and the other therapists and counselors she introduced me to—about this Abby Bliss person. I talked about a high school I never went to and a neighborhood I could only barely envision. A lot of what I was describing I probably didn’t really remember: I was building a world from photos I’d seen on my parents’ computers or in the photo albums that lined a couple of shelves in a bookcase in our den. (For a while, my mom actually printed out photos and put them in albums. That stopped when I was about nine or ten, I guess. Then the photos just piled up in drawers. Who had time? Besides, by then we were keeping our photos on our phones and Facebook and Tumblr.)
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